So, do you prefer it here then?

I get this question ALL the time. And after 12 years living in the United States which I honestly see as home, I still don't know how to answer it.

If you say 'no', then you're some Johnny Foreigner who is just here to milk the land.

If you say 'yes', then there's a satisfaction in the questionner's eyes that you've given up the pining (allbeit infrequent) for the tiny inexplicable things from the "old country" and submitted to a new life in the land of the free.

I got it today with Mr. Arsecrack who turned up to do what Mr. Pipes was supposed to do yesterday but didn't.

Don't get me wrong Mr. Arsecrack (who, after very few questions I learned had been out of Pennsylvania just once since he was born -- to Florida); I'm very happy to be here and am proud to see this as my home - and I feel very at home 99% of the time. But this isn't a yes/no question.

It's the other 1% of the time that I'm made to feel like an outsider because I speak differently from the locals. If I were obviously foreign (Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Chinese for example) - I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be asked. It's the fact that I'm obviously a native English speaker and obviously not originally from here. That's what causes "the question" to be asked.

Is it just a way of saying "tell me more about yourself because I don't really know what else to ask?" or does it really mean "well, you've obviously been here long enough and had the chance to fuck off back to wherever you came from if you didn't like it, so would you just let me know that it's awesome here and crap wherever you came from please? So I, like, don't have to go there and find out for myself."

Oh, I don't know. Maybe some suggestions in the comments might help me out here?

Water water everywhere and not a drop to wash with

Fun night last night. She who must be obeyed and I staggered back in the door about 1:15am after going out on an inpromptu piss-up.

Many beers on board, all I wanted to do is climb up the wooden hill and fall into a delicious alcohol-induced nocturnal slumber, but this was not to be.

I was smart enough to take a plumber's advice years ago and install water alarms next to things that might one day fail. You know - water heater, furnace, toilets etc. Last night was the water heater's turn. And it obviously had a lot of fun on its last evening as a functioning water heater.

There was water gushing about everywhere, being obediently replaced and re-boiled by Mr. Stopcock. Or whatever his name is.

Net result was there was a lot of water on the kitchen floor. About 40 gallons of it, if the sign on old holey bottom was to be believed. So, I just turned the water and gas off and went back to my original intention. After leaving a drunk message for Mr. Pipes to pick up in the morning.

Mr. Pipes woke me up at 8:03 this morning with a cheery: "So, yer water heater's fucked then is it?".

"Yes, it certainly seems that way"

"Be there between 11 and 1."

"OK"

Stagger bleary-eyed into the bathroom. Nice seated morning activity as usual, then into the shower. Where the hot water tap isn't working. Somehow my brain had not managed to connect the fact that the water heater had finished spewing its contents onto the kitchen floor not 7 hours prior, and the fact that that meant "no hot water" until the water heater was un-fucked (as Mr. Pipes would have put it).

So, I write this having boiled a kettle and had a whore's bath which wasn't very satisfying. I don't know how they live like that. I like to wash as much as the average guy I guess - but nothing beats that "fresh feeling" after a bit of rumpy pumpy. And if one were to rump and pump a few times of an evening, I'd imagine that a flannel and a bowlful of hot water would not quite cut the mustard. So to speak.

More to come on the water heater saga. It isn't fixed yet, because Mr. Pipes couldn't get to it. Well, not in the way he wanted to.

Buggers.

Garmin Nuvi 660

This is a cool bit of kit.

I'd wanted a GPS (for some reason) for quite some time. A TomTom seemed to be the obvious choice - they're clearly the market leader, and I was quite prepared to buy one.

To get the tax write-off, I needed to get one by the end of 2006 and in my typical prepared fashion, I went shopping on December 31st.

Probably something to do with the retail frenzy that was going on at the end of the year, but everyone was out of TomToms. Every shop, every model. BestBuy, Staples ... all out.

I had remembered seeing them at Sharper Image, so I headed off there to see what they had. That's when I saw the Garmin Nuvi, and the simplicity of the thing is what sold me. This is so simple to use, that even my tech-challenged girlfriend was able to use it with no instruction whatsover. This is product design at its best: simple, intuitive and packed with features.

Lazy man's sandwich

Sandwiches are pretty lazy food anyway. Even lazier is a sandwich made using no knife and no plate. Therefore no clean up.

The lazy sandwich: get two slices of white bread. Pour squeezy mayo onto one slice. Mash the two slices of bread together. Pull apart again, making a V shape with the two slices. Get a handful of salt and vinegar crisps/chips and put into the middle. Crunch together. Eat.

Prep time: 5-10 seconds.

Fantastic.

No washing up to do either. No cleanup, no mess. Just a few crumbs on the floor. Who cares. Dog will eat them I suppose.

Nokia 6230i - one word for it: excellent

It's so good - I have to write something about it.

I've had Nokia phones for about 12 years now. I admit that I was a little disappointed with the fact that Nokia was pretty late to the party with clamshell (flip) phones coz I really wanted one. But there was no way I was going to buy any of the "doorsteps with a hinge" that are currently in their range.

So I must admit I was looking at other manufacturers for my next phone; my 6200 was getting a little long in the tooth. In fact, it was one step away from completely fucked.

Let's face it (maybe you didn't know this), but the cellphone line-up in the US is a little lacking at best. All the providers (Verizon, Cingular, T-Mobile) offer great deals (read "free") on phones from 2 years ago.

So I decided to tape together what remained of my 6200 and wait until I was in Europe over Christmas to see what was on offer there. Amazing post-Christmas sales, and I was down to a shortlist of two from the Nokia store: the candy bar 6230i andthe 5200 slider.

Unfortunately, the store I was in only had the 5200 in pink, so that wasn't an option, so I went with the 6230i. I paid about $140 US for it. And let me tell you - it's the best phone I've ever had.

Now, I'm not one of those people who want a phone for all the gadgets and gizmos it has - there are friends of mine who take the Swiss Army Knife approach to their cellphone. I just want to make calls on it, perhaps a few little goodies for me to play with - like the camera, perhaps. But I'm not into the one-size-fits-all crap with MP3 players and video editing software and radios and all that nonsense.

But it seems that Nokia have packed pretty much everything into the 3oz 6230i. Which isn't available in the US - so if that's where you are and you like what you see (don't just take my word for it - the blogosphere denizens are raving about it) - you'll have to get it on eBay or something.

1.3 mpixel camera, media player, music player (mp3, m4a and aac as far as I can tell) with a graphic equalizer(!!!), radio, voice recorder - all cool stuff. Plus the advantage of the familiar Nokia user interface so you're not messing around learning what all those crazy symbols mean (no names mentioned, Moto). All the other usual stuff: txt msg, IM, push-to-talk, calendar, to-do list, calculator, games and stuff to add to the PDA experience if you really want all that - but it's nowhere near as good as PDA/Windows mobile - and why on earth would you expect that from a phone?

What's really neat is that you can connect to your PC (to organize names, addresses, ringtones blah blah) using either bluetooth, IR or a cable (not included - but you'll need a DKU-2 cable if you want to go this route).

The battery lasts for ages too. I don't know exactly how long - but it's longer than any other I've had. I use the phone pretty much all day, and it's not needed charging for 3 days.

Using the 6230i in the US

Now - don't believe all that garbage from the cellphone providers about foreign phones not working in the US. It's tri-band GSM - no problem. What you will probably need to do is get it unlocked. I bought mine with O2 pay-as-you-go service. And obviously had no intention of using it. And I screwed up the 3 unlock attempts that you get (remote unlocking) with some piece of shitty software that I downloaded that obviously gave me the wrong code.

You can unlock using a web-based service - I really like the experience I had with unlocktotalk.com - you mail off your phone, pay them $12 via paypal, and they send it back the day they receive (and unlock) it. There are other services on the web which will give you the code - or you can go into a wireless store in your local chinatown or whatever and they'll do it. But go careful with this free software and unknown web-based services who are quite happy to take your credit card details, supply you with a duff code, then try to tell you it's your fault that it doesn't work.

There are plenty of resources on the web regarding unlocking: as I said - a word of caution - you only get 3 goes if you're using codes. My opinion (now) is that it's worth the few dollars to pay for the correct code, but you could try 1 or 2 from freeware if you're feeling brave.

All in all, I'm one happy camper. If you get one and you're already a Nokia fan, I don't think you'll be disappointed.